9 October 2014

Today’s attached document, also
linked below, is Marx’s Critique of the Gotha
Programme. It is a great classic. Among our sixteen current Communist
University courses, it is used in four of them.

In this case, our
introduction can largely come from Great Lenin himself, in the fifth chapter of
“The State and Revolution”. That chapter is dedicated to “The Critique of the
Gotha Programme”.

Writing of the “withering
away of the state”, Lenin begins by making a distinction between the
“polemical” and the “positive” parts of this text of Marx’s:

“Marx
explains this question most thoroughly in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.
The polemical part of this remarkable work, which contains a criticism of
Lassalleanism, has, so to speak, overshadowed its positive part, namely, the
analysis of the connection between the development of communism and the
withering away of the state.”

Lenin takes the “theory of
development” as a given, fixed and firm. He writes:

“The whole
theory of Marx is the application of the theory of development - in its most
consistent, complete, considered and pithy form - to modern capitalism.
Naturally, Marx was faced with the problem of applying this theory both to the
forthcoming collapse of capitalism and to the future development of future
communism.”

In “The State and
Revolution”, Lenin quotes the following directly from “The Critique of the
Gotha Programme”:

"Between
capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a
political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat."

In the same chapter, Lenin
notes in his own words, as follows:

“In the
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx goes into detail to disprove Lassalle's
idea that under socialism the worker will receive the "undiminished"
or "full product of his labor". Marx shows that from the whole of the
social labor of society there must be deducted a reserve fund, a fund for the
expansion of production, a fund for the replacement of the "wear and
tear" of machinery, and so on. Then, from the means of consumption must be
deducted a fund for administrative expenses, for schools, hospitals, old
people's homes, and so on. Instead of Lassalle's hazy, obscure, general phrase
("the full product of his labor to the worker"), Marx makes a sober
estimate of exactly how socialist society will have to manage its affairs.”

The following, directly taken from Marx’s text, is a point for the advocates of
nationalisation to ponder. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the best that Marx
can manage to say for co-ops is:

“That the workers desire to establish the conditions
for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national
scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize
the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the
foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present
co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they
are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the
governments or of the bourgeois.”

Lenin remarks (about the Gotha Programme):

“Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of
the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration
and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and
hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.”

Socialism is not all about “delivery”.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme is a very relevant document for
today, and it is short. It is a classic. It is worth studying.

·The above is to
introduce the original reading-text:The Critique of the
Gotha Programme, Part 1, and Part 2, Marx, 1875.